A clove of garlic a day keeps the vampires at bay

Clooney sheds stethoscope for stake

January 20, 1996
Web posted at: 11:20 p.m EST

From Correspondent Mark Scheerer

NEW YORK (CNN) -- George Clooney is a smooth operator on the
hit television show "ER," but in a blood-curdling role
reversal, he fills up emergency rooms as a bad guy in his
first major film, "From Dusk Till Dawn."

There's no mistaking Clooney in his new film. He's
Seth Gecko, a ruthless bank robber who's only slightly less
evil than his brother, Richie, played by screenwriter Quentin
Tarantino.

"You'll get famous for doing one particular thing, like 'ER,'
and then suddenly that's what people think of you. I did
years of bad television, being bad in it, so this is no
departure from that," Clooney says.

Good television, in the form of the NBC hit show "ER," has
made Clooney a famous television physician. You can add to
the list of TV's top docs, like Ben Casey and Marcus Welby,
Clooney's Dr. Douglas Ross.

Clooney says that Dr. Ross and Gecko probably wouldn't be
golf buddies if they met. "I don't know what his reaction
would be to Seth Gecko, but well, he'd have to fix him."

Of his character Gecko, Clooney says, "He has kind of a bit
of early Robert Mitchum, early Steve McQueen kind of thing
going."

What starts out like a "Pulp Fiction" sequel turns into a
full-blown vampire movie, under the direction of Robert
Rodriguez, who directed the low-budget Sundance Film Festival
winner, "El Mariachi."

One might ask why Clooney would want to make his film debut
immersed in the cult violence expertise of Rodriguez and
Tarantino. "Why? Let me think: Quentin Tarantino, Robert
Rodriguez, Harvey Keitel, Juliette Lewis ... I dunno. For me
it's 'How lucky am I? How lucky am I to get a chance to work
with those people?'"

And this is not Clooney's first horror feature role, oh no.
There were juicy roles in such living-room classics as
"Return of the Killer Tomatoes" and "Return to Horror High."

But Clooney admits that he hadn't planned on this kind of
return. "I was going to try and be very careful about what I
took, wanted to do a couple of small scenes in a good film,
just to get an introduction, cause I didn't want to go whole
hog. Then this came around and I went whole hog."

Whole hog? George Clooney's gone from killer tomatoes to
killing vampires alongside Quentin Tarantino while sporting a
pretty elaborate tattoo. A Victorian romance it's not, but it
will certainly make those patients think twice about taking
Dr. Ross' advice.